The kidney stone episodes I alluded to in Part I were plenty painful, but I can tell you that the day they took off my splint and fitted me for a cast was for me a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day The nurse jostled my arm a little taking off the splint, and it was as if she'd clubbed me with a baseball bat. In fact I almost threw up and I had to lie down for a few minutes to recover. Then they X-rayed it, forcing me to twist this way & that and I suddenly discovered: my arm didn't do that any more. By the time I got the cast on, I was grateful for the respite.
When I finally got the cast off, I had 'only' a long brace, and I got to start PT. Here's where I started: if a 'handshake' position is 0 degrees, and palm-up is 90, I was at -5. I could only bend it backward & forward about 15-20 degrees. For 3 weeks I was stretched hot-packed, ultrasounded, and electrically stimulated; I did all manner of exercises both in PT and at home. Then I went back to the doctor.
He was Not Happy, and he muttered darkly about "never getting it back" if I couldn't step up my game. He wanted me to hurt myself. I protested that I had always heard pain was a signal to back off, but he said it was time to push through the pain. When I asked him how far to push, he replied, "I want you to push until you want to punch me."
Cue the Rocky training montage (hold the raw eggs). I worked as hard as I could, and I did push myself, although I'm sure I didn't do "enough" home exercise. There's only so many times a day that you can block off a 20-30 minute chunk of time; since I had to work the weaker hand with the stronger one, both were occupied and it sure is hard to get much else accomplished. You can't keep up with a blog, I proved that.
Finally at the end of March I was released from PT -- but he warned me that if I didn't keep working, I'd start going backwards.
On the one-year anniversary of the surgery, I see that it's probably never going to be "normal" again. I still walk around a lot of the time, holding my wrist with the other hand, rubbing it, stretching it... hoping to make it feel less tight, less stiff, less sore, stronger. If I bend it hard, just the right way, it makes exactly the same sound a bowling ball makes when it comes out of the chute and smacks into the other balls on the rack.
So you can see what good it did me to be positive for once.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
The Unkindest Cut, Part I
In some ways I suppose I resemble Linus; while I never carried a blanket or sucked my thumb, he's kind of a nerd who wears glasses, seems pretty introspective and is comfortable with his spiritual side. I'd also have to guess that, though I don't recall seeing this in a strip , like me he ended up with a TRS-80
That may even be a little flattering to me, but I also must confess that I identify as much or more with Charlie Brown. Like the round-headed kid, I was not necessarily popular with my peer group; I always loved baseball even though I was not always noticeably successful at it; and I was more than a little crazy about a red-haired girl.
I wouldn't be surprised if Charlie Brown had the same dream I did as a kid, over and over. I'm playing the outfield as the red-haired girl watches, there's a deep fly ball and I race back back back... at the last possible instant I leap to snag the ball as I crash into the fence.
A hush falls over the crowd as I am carted off the field and the red-haired girl rushes to my side with, you know, like shining in her eyes. I think she smiles at me, maybe touches my hand, as they wheel me off to... I don't know, rebuild me, make me better than I was. As long as I impressed the girl, I didn't much care what came next.
In real life, I never made that kind of catch and I didn't get very far with the red-haired girl, and I also never spent much time at the hospital. Never broke a bone, never had my tonsils out, never even had a cavity. I've racked up a couple of ER visits for kidney stones -- which, ouch, but pain meds for a few days and a lot of water, and the pain more or less, um, passes.
Then a couple summers ago, I noticed a sharp pain in my right wrist when I lifted or pulled something; one night I pulled hard on a heavy object and got a blinding flash of pain. The orthopedist said I had injured the TFCC in the wrist, basically a repetitive-stress injury caused by the outer bone of the forearm (ulna) being longer than the inner bone (radius); the imbalance basically causes the head of the ulna to pulverize the cartilage. This is called being "ulnar positive", which refutes all the people who have said I don't have a positive bone in my body.
I had a couple cortisone shots to stave off the pain, though the doctor made it clear that I was only postponing the inevitable -- since they weren't making my ulna any shorter. Finally -- last Halloween -- I experienced the first medical procedure of my life.
When people hear "wrist surgery", they usually think (1) carpal tunnel, which this wasn't, and (2) arthroscopic. My wrist actually was scoped to clean up the cartilage tear, but since the real problem was the length of my ulna...
The other part of my procedure was called an ulnar osteotomy, which like most uses of medical terminology is meant to camouflage the fact that they open up your arm, cut a small wafer of bone out of the ulna, and put it back together with a plate and screws.
Maybe your favorite ballplayer came back in a week or 10 days after a scope, but I ended up in a huge & cumbersome splint for 2 weeks, followed by 2 weeks in a cast running from my knuckles past my elbow.
I couldn't drive, or type, (that is, work) for the entire month of November, but I was OK with that because I figured I'd get the cast off at the end of November, do a couple weeks' PT, and be good as new by Christmas!
I figured wrong.
That may even be a little flattering to me, but I also must confess that I identify as much or more with Charlie Brown. Like the round-headed kid, I was not necessarily popular with my peer group; I always loved baseball even though I was not always noticeably successful at it; and I was more than a little crazy about a red-haired girl.
I wouldn't be surprised if Charlie Brown had the same dream I did as a kid, over and over. I'm playing the outfield as the red-haired girl watches, there's a deep fly ball and I race back back back... at the last possible instant I leap to snag the ball as I crash into the fence.
A hush falls over the crowd as I am carted off the field and the red-haired girl rushes to my side with, you know, like shining in her eyes. I think she smiles at me, maybe touches my hand, as they wheel me off to... I don't know, rebuild me, make me better than I was. As long as I impressed the girl, I didn't much care what came next.
In real life, I never made that kind of catch and I didn't get very far with the red-haired girl, and I also never spent much time at the hospital. Never broke a bone, never had my tonsils out, never even had a cavity. I've racked up a couple of ER visits for kidney stones -- which, ouch, but pain meds for a few days and a lot of water, and the pain more or less, um, passes.
Then a couple summers ago, I noticed a sharp pain in my right wrist when I lifted or pulled something; one night I pulled hard on a heavy object and got a blinding flash of pain. The orthopedist said I had injured the TFCC in the wrist, basically a repetitive-stress injury caused by the outer bone of the forearm (ulna) being longer than the inner bone (radius); the imbalance basically causes the head of the ulna to pulverize the cartilage. This is called being "ulnar positive", which refutes all the people who have said I don't have a positive bone in my body.
I had a couple cortisone shots to stave off the pain, though the doctor made it clear that I was only postponing the inevitable -- since they weren't making my ulna any shorter. Finally -- last Halloween -- I experienced the first medical procedure of my life.
When people hear "wrist surgery", they usually think (1) carpal tunnel, which this wasn't, and (2) arthroscopic. My wrist actually was scoped to clean up the cartilage tear, but since the real problem was the length of my ulna...
The other part of my procedure was called an ulnar osteotomy, which like most uses of medical terminology is meant to camouflage the fact that they open up your arm, cut a small wafer of bone out of the ulna, and put it back together with a plate and screws.
Maybe your favorite ballplayer came back in a week or 10 days after a scope, but I ended up in a huge & cumbersome splint for 2 weeks, followed by 2 weeks in a cast running from my knuckles past my elbow.
I couldn't drive, or type, (that is, work) for the entire month of November, but I was OK with that because I figured I'd get the cast off at the end of November, do a couple weeks' PT, and be good as new by Christmas!
I figured wrong.
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